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Attention GMAT Takers!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (very important)

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by itheenigma » Wed Sep 21, 2011 4:07 am
Guys,

I wrote the test yesterday. Am quite happy with my score. 730! Yippee! :)
I'll be posting a de-brief soon, but I just thought I'd share this piece of info with future test takers.

I didn't find anything in the actual GMAT that was different from the GMAT Preps I had taken a while ago. As usual, there were some sneaky questions thrown in here and there to catch me off guard, but it was ok! I got 3 questions where they tested me on incorrect usage of idioms. (I'm guessing these are the residual idiom questions in the question pool??) Plus, there were some 2-3 questions in SC where I wasn't able to find anything gramatically wrong in 2 choices. Thank heavens I was able to spot a minor deviation from the original meaning in one of those choices at the last moment. :-p

All in all, I agree with the expert opinions posted above, and wouldn't worry too much about the pattern change. It was a fun exam, and I loved the elegant twists in the questions...Peepuls who are taking the test in the near future can even expect the same number of idiom questions as they would have faced previously.

Cheers!
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by lunarpower » Sat Oct 15, 2011 10:55 pm
i'm a little bit late to this thread, but i figured i should still offer my thoughts. basically, my principal thought is this:
i don't really think that this announcement changes anything very much.

in particular, the announcement about the emphasis on meaning is not really very significant at all -- because SC has always been about meaning. in fact, as i have said in hundreds, if not thousands, of posts on this forum, every major error type on SC is already associated with meaning.

two things:

1/
here's a more comprehensive summary of my thoughts on this particular subject:
https://www.beatthegmat.com/companies-in ... tml#367679

2/
if anyone out there is still thinking that you could even have SC without grammar -- consider the following question: WHAT IS grammar?
...
...
if you think about this question for a while, you will probably come up with something to the effect of "a set of rules designed to make sentences express their intended meaning more clearly".
in other words, without the meaning of the sentence, grammar doesn't even exist. so, gmac's announcement is pretty much just telling us what we already know.

the reason this isn't anything new is that the gmat doesn't test -- and NEVER has tested -- the parts of the english language that don't use meaning. for instance, this test has never, ever, ever tested things like word order and spelling, which are essentially arbitrary and not meaning-based.

--

the only sense in which this announcement is significant is its confirmation of the idea that idioms are not worth memorizing, except inasmuch as they change the meaning of the sentence.
so, for all of you who have just committed long list of idioms to memory without understanding how to use them, tough luck -- time to start over from scratch with the same lists, but this time learning what the idioms actually signify in terms of meaning.
Ron has been teaching various standardized tests for 20 years.

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by MBACenter » Fri Oct 21, 2011 3:34 am
David@VeritasPrep wrote:A long- awaited wake-up call to the masses!!

This is really no change at all in sentence correction. It should be a change in the way people approach sentence correction!!!!!

I rarely post in the S C forum because postings so often are focused on the tiniest details of grammar or some minuscule idiom, when there is another very straightforward way to deal with the sentence. It is as if people are more comfortable trying to memorize all possible obscure rules rather than to develop a consistent strategy.

I for one am excited that this will bring students around to the two pillars of sentence correction: logic and grammar and maybe the sentence correction forum will not be tied up in the tiniest obscure idioms.
THANK YOU FOR SAYING IT!!!

The danger with memorizing a huge list of rules is that you lose sight of why the grammatical rules exist in the first place. They exist to give clear guidelines for writing meaningful sentences. When you lose sight of that, you risk looking for minuscule errors in sentences when in fact NONE ARE EVEN THERE AT ALL!!

The final answer choice, taken as a whole, should sound "GOOD." Not necessarily the way you would have thought to write this particular idea into a sentence, but it will sound good like an adult human wrote it and not a chimpanzee.
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by MBACenter » Fri Oct 21, 2011 3:46 am
itheenigma wrote:
itheenigma wrote: And wait a minute...
2 more than one answer will be correct
??
That's impossible! Where did we come across this information?
Oh, you probably mean grammatically correct...
Yeah sure, I have come across such questions in the old GMAT Prep too (among the harder ones). Focus on such questions will be on preserving the meaning of the original sentence as well as understanding that a sentence can be wrong even though it is grammatically correct....

Cheers!
CAREFUL, THOUGH!!

The "original" meaning is sometimes illogical. If that is the case, the original meaning needs to be replaced.

It is not so much about which answer choice "preserves the meaning of the original" as about which one communicates the logical and likely-intended meaning. An illogical sentence is as good as an ungrammatical one, because it fails to get across what it was supposed to get across.

A syntactical error in grammar is akin to an incomplete statement or an illegal function call in computer programming. A semantic error (illogical meaning) in grammar is akin to a bug that causes the program to shift to a mode it wasn't intended to shift to at that time. An idiomatic error is an error in a variable that causes a display that you weren't hoping for.

But in any event... the sentence/program doesn't do what you wanted it to do.
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